Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024)

[diamonds]

Your post led me to this official video which is apparently new and was directed by Alex Ross Perry

There is word that Alex Ross Perry is possibly working on "some meta half-fictionalized history of Pavement" project, which somehow interfaces with a pop-up museum exhibit devoted to the band currently on display in NYC.

[therewillbeblus]

Your post led me to this official video which is apparently new and was directed by Alex Ross Perry

There is word that Alex Ross Perry is possibly working on "some meta half-fictionalized history of Pavement" project, which somehow interfaces with a pop-up museum exhibit devoted to the band currently on display in NYC.

More details on ARP’s Pavement musical

[diamonds]

New Yorker interview with Perry. The stage musical will be a part of a film project.

He was directing a workshop of “Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical,” about the Stockton slacker-rock quintet. Perry created the piece to feature in a screwball movie about the band which he is also directing, and which he has described variously as “a semiotic experiment” and “like throwing spaghetti at the wall.”

[...]

Three years ago, Pavement’s label, Matador Records, approached Perry about a collaboration. The band wanted a movie, but Stephen Malkmus, the front man, said he wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to hire a screenwriter. But he didn’t want a screenplay. “No one knew what that meant,” Perry said.

Perry resolved to approach the impossible assignment from impossible angles: “Legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical,” he said, and offered a Bob Dylan analogy. “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates”—“Renaldo and Clara”—“and put them all in a blender.” The resulting film will be a mélange of bio-pic, museum footage, bits of “Slanted! Enchanted!,” tour doc, farce, and paean. Perry formulated his own thesis: What if Pavement, the Pynchonian rock group that never had a platinum record, was the most important band of all time?

[Roger Ryan]

Oh wait, glad too to see that Alex Ross Perry's Pavement movie is done

Is it actually titled "Pavements" (plural) as indicated in the Indie Wire article or is that a mistake?

[diamonds]

Is it actually titled "Pavements" (plural) as indicated in the Indie Wire article or is that a mistake?

It is actually called Pavements, and in fact it's already been screened for a few critics in some form. There's an interview with Perry about it in Cinema Scope.

[therewillbeblus]

There's an interview with Perry about it in Cinema Scope.

Great interview, thanks for sharing! I love how Perry refers to Kicking and Screaming as "the movie equivalent of Pavement."

[diamonds]

Official teaser for Range Life: A Pavement Story

Spoiler

The fake biopic within Alex Ross Perry's Pavements

[criterionsnob]

So this is two films? I thought it was just a title change.

[brundlefly]

Following the teaser for the film within the film, here's the trailer for Alex Ross Perry's Pavements.

[hearthesilence]

Per Mark Ibold at a Film Forum Q&A, when the band first saw the film (or what they thought was the film) at the Alamo Drafthouse, they were only shown the biographical film within the film (i.e. Range Life), not realizing the film as whole was far from finished and that it was going to be three stylistically different strands tied together. Perry actually wanted them to understand that and made a point to put that in an email before they saw it, but perhaps fittingly, no one apparently read his email, or at least read that specific part. I think Ibold said they were so busy with the Brooklyn Steel shows that it was probably why they didn't read the email. (As mentioned upthread, I was at the last show of that run, and it was AWESOME.)